It is expected that US President Joe Biden will announce his position on what is known as the annihilation of security during the First World War, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that his country will continue to defend what he described as facts against those who stand for political reasons behind the fabrications.
Three sources familiar with the matter said that Biden is likely to use the term "genocide" in a statement on April 24th when it holds annual events to commemorate victims around the world.
"What I understood was that he made the decision and would use the term genocide in his statement on Saturday," said a source familiar with the matter.
However, the sources indicated that Biden may influence at the last moment not to use this term in light of the importance of bilateral relations with Turkey.
White House spokeswoman Jane Saki told reporters on Wednesday that the White House would likely have "more to say" on the issue on Saturday, but she declined to elaborate.
Although the move will be largely symbolic, it means a radical change in the very cautious wording that the White House adopted decades ago, and it comes at a time of clash between Ankara and Washington over a number of other files.
The US State Department referred questions about the matter to the White House, and the National Security Council had no comment in addition to what Saki said.
Biden had commemorated a year ago, when he was still a presidential candidate, the memory of the 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children who lost their lives in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, and said he would support efforts to describe those killings as genocide.
Turkish warning
On the other hand, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşolu said that any move by Biden to describe the genocide killings would inflict more damage on the already strained relations between the two countries that are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The president's office said on Thursday that Erdogan emphasized continuing to defend the facts in the face of the lie of the so-called Armenian Genocide and against those who support "this politically motivated slander."
In 2019, the US Senate passed a non-binding resolution recognizing the killings as genocide, in a historic move that at the time increased Turkey's anger.
Armenia demands Turkey to acknowledge what happened during the 1915 deportation process as "ethnic genocide", and thus pay compensation, while Turkey affirms that the 1915 events cannot be labeled "ethnic genocide", but rather describes it as a tragedy for both parties.
Ankara calls for dealing with the file away from political conflicts, and resolving the issue through the perspective of "fair memory", which in short means abandoning the one-sided view of history, and each side understands what the other lived, and mutual respect for each party's past memory.